The Holy Foreskin: Author seeks snippets of history

If you’ve ever wondered what it took to make mild-mannered travel guru Rick Steves utter the phrase “Jesus’ penis” (and seriously, who among us hasn’t wondered that?), author Dave Farley knows.

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The answer: Spend five years in Rome and an odd-ball nearby village writing a book about, among other things, “the Holy Foreskin.” (Steves, who has whimsy to spare, featured Farley, a New York-based travel writer, on his radio show, managing to hit almost every euphemism possible for the topic.)

Farley’s book, “An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town,” answers every question you might have had about “the only piece of flesh (Jesus) would have left on Earth when he ascended into Heaven.”

The book is a hilarious look at the baffling world of Christian relics, as well as a very personal view of Calcata, the tiny, quirky village where “the Relic” resided for centuries.

In the book (released this week in paperback), Farley covers:

* Why the Vatican threatened to excommunicate anyone who talked about the only remaining piece of Christianity’s namesake.

* How the author managed to talk his way into the Vatican Library to research the topic.

* How an isolated bastion of traditional Italian life became infested by hippie squatters, eventually evolving into a Bohemian art community.

* How a decision by early Church leaders consequently turned the Relic into the only “piece of God on Earth.”

* Why there were as many as five churches or organizations each claiming to have the one true, er, um, Relic.

(Editor’s note: Under new Federal Trade Commission guidelines, it should subtly be disclosed that Farley gave me a free copy of the book — and that we discussed the topic over Guinness and tequila shots in a New York nightclub before the discussion turned to finding a bar that had a mechanical bull. I think.)

In the end, it’s Farley’s travels through Rome, and his exploring — not just into surreal history, but into the personality of the largely unheard of village — that make “An Irreverent Curiosity” a travel book (along with a few other genres).